


City, Screaming

by LectorEl



Series: Glass Heart [2]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 17:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1396333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LectorEl/pseuds/LectorEl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim mourns, and the knight mourns, and Gotham mourns. They’re bound together by the shed blood of a bird who fell in flight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	City, Screaming

Hope is a thing with feathers and eyes as blue as the summer sky. Tim thinks he might love Robin, as much as his fragmented heart can. He’s color against the grey-scale Gotham night, jewel tones that outshine the arc-sodium glow of neon signs and industrial harshness of the streetlights. It makes something in his stomach twist when he watches from the rooftops.

Gotham giggles when Robin goes out. She ushers out her gaudy streetwalkers, her tired third shift workers, her immigrants working at the docks, putting on her best to woo the bird that’s come to build its nest among her branches. Everything’s better and brighter and sharper and _realer_ when Robin flew across the night sky.

The nights that Tim can’t be there when Robin flies are a misery, glass heart rattling in harmony with the subway cars. The heart belongs to the city, and its rhythms are Gotham’s, as much as his own. The city reaches out, looking for the viewfinder that tracks its favorite bird, calling and calling until Tim has to slip out his window and start running towards Gotham, pulled by the hungry petulance of the young city.

She’s lonely. Tim understands that. Gotham’s heart is a thing of glass and metal, paint and fabric, just like his. She’s lonely, even with her knight and her hunting bird. Tim’s the only one with a heart she can reach, screaming out two centuries of unvoiced hurts. She so lonely, and hungry, starved for companionship, desperate in a way only another lonely soul can understand.

Tim gave his heart to her almost before he was old enough to understand what he was doing. She’s lonely, and in love with a bright-feathered thing that would never love her back, not the way she wanted. Tim aches for her, for all things she would never have. Her heart was broken too. Tim can’t help but love her, love his city-sister-self. They’re both children too young to be on their own, glass-hearted and fragile.

Gotham loves Tim too, he’s almost sure. She pours herself into him, patching over his empty places and filling in his cracks with sidewalk pavement and skyscraper steel. Nobody sees Tim when he goes out in Gotham, filled with the feverheat joy of being so much _other_ than human. He can watch anything, go anywhere, stand in front of security cameras and walk past guards without notice.

They blur into each other, Gotham swelling up to occupy the hollow places inside him. There are times when ‘Tim Drake’ feels like a skin stretched too-tight over his city-self-sister. He could shed the skin as easily as stepping into the subway. Let Gotham the rest of the way in, bleed into her until he is nothing more than a boy-shaped extension of the city.

He almost does, when Robin dies. Tim feels the bird fall, half a world away from themselves. Tim feels him die, phantom bruises rising on his skin. Gotham weeps, and Tim weeps with her. They drape themselves in mourning black, putting away laughing streetwalkers and tired men who smile when they pass. The bird is dead, and nothing now can come to any good.

Tim mourns, and the knight mourns, and Gotham mourns. They’re bound together by the shed blood of a bird who fell in flight. The nights grow darker, the criminals crueler, the decay thicker. Everything falls apart.

Tim suffocates in Bristol. His lungs labor for city air. Gotham calls him home, and every moment apart is an agony. Tim grows reckless as the months pass, staying in Gotham for days at a time. He stalks the knight relentlessly. Every time, he inches closer.

It’s perhaps inevitable that the knight catches him. Tim doesn’t know what he sees when he looks at Tim, but it’s enough to make him curse, and growl, and pull Tim into the batmobile. By the time they realize the knight is trying to take Tim out of Gotham, he’s halfway to the bridge. Gotham howls, jamming the streets with cars and throwing open the gates of Arkham.

The knight drives on, ignoring the incoherent fury Gotham spews from Tim’s mouth. He crosses the bridge, crosses Bristol, drives into the black mouth of his hidden cave. Tim is lifted from the car, still raving, and chained to a hospital bed. The knight says something that Tim can’t hear over the city’s howls. A needle pricks his skin and Tim succumbs to blackness.

When Tim wakes, he feels hollowed out. Gotham is gone. He moans, weakly, and starts at the feel of hands against his skin.

“You’re awake,” Batman says to him. “Good. Now you’re going to learn to keep it that way.”


End file.
